Record Reconstructor

  This Week: New HAIM album; songs for drinking, geopolitical disasters This is a day late but I had a pretty busy weekend;  we were entertaining my mother-in-law from Friday afternoon to Monday morning, had the social event of the summer in the Locksley Beer Festival on Saturday, and then a day watching tennis at the Nottingham Open Final yesterday, leaving me little time to write my blog.  It's also been incredibly hot all weekend and it's caused me to sleep very badly, in addition to generally sleeping badly because my global terrible news quota has meant my worry bucket is very full.  I've become concerned that I am somehow speaking terrible, anxiety-inducing apocalyptic events into existence through this blog like some internet-enabled Death Note notebook, so I'd just like to say that I think this week, hugely positive things will happen in global geopolitics, capitalist systems will be exposed and everyone will get a free week off.  At this point, that had...

Dashboard! I took a swing at the intro to this article a couple of different times over the last few days, and I couldn't quite figure out how to frame it correctly.  I was wandering off into weird writing cul de sacs and never felt like I was getting any nearer what I was trying to say until last night, when I was driving to play tennis, when I remembered a story which helped frame the whole thing for me.  So, lets start again shall we? This is a true story, the context of which will hopefully become apparent as it relates to my larger point.  In my life, I have witnessed and been involved in many misguided attempts to express to a long-term or passing object of someone's affection their heartfelt desire to end up in bed with them.  It's the eternal question of adolescence, " How do I talk to (meaning seduce) people of the gender I'm sexually attracted to?" .  No attempt has ever been more misguided nor doomed to failure than the night I spent around a campfi...

Dashboard! People who have been reading this blog in sequence might have noticed a certain level of reluctance for me to engage with the music streaming services which ultimately are powering this entire project;  obviously, I would much rather the musical artists I love get paid well for their artistic contributions instead of what modern distribution allows them.  Gone are the days when musical acts toured in order to promote the album, sales of which was the primary revenue stream for them and their label (and in fact, many tours lost money).  Now, where getting 30,000 plays on Spotify pays less to an artist than a single sale of a £30 vinyl from their direct storefront, live music tours, and their associated merchandise have become the primary source of income for anyone trying to really make a living as a professional musician. Also, if you've been paying attention, you will be aware there were long sections of my life when I have been very financially disadvantaged;...